I have tried something like the following,

my $artists = $schema->resultset('Artist') ;
# $artists->result_class
   ('DBIx::Class::ResultClass::HashRefInflator'); # will cause errors
my $artistAndTitles = $artists->next->cds() ;
$artistAndTitles->result_class
   ('DBIx::Class::ResultClass::HashRefInflator');
while (my $hashref = $artistAndTitles->next) {
  print Dumper($hashref) ;
}
[download]

But this way I only get a 'shallow' hash from the 'cds' result subset for only one row at a time instead of each Artist + all the titles.

Maybe there is another way? Examples appreciated.

Documentation report:

... Specifying this class as a result_class for a resultset will change $rs->next to return a plain data hash-ref (or a list of such hash-refs if $rs->all is used

so last lines of your code turn in

my @hashref = $artistAndTitles->all;
print Dumper(\@hashref) ;
[download]


($_="nzz ojjdloobnf jjt tqqbebd77jojxfc")=~y~wb-zg2-5c96-8~aa-z0-9~s=~s~~~s;$_=~y~5-8~fuck~;print

That still prints only one 'Artist' row at a time and it only prints data from 'cds' ('shallow'). I am looking for something much more sophisticated than that in the sense recursiveness and flexibility (e.g. being able to specify multiple relations either one-to-many or many-to-many on different levels and keeping the full functionality of the ResultSet class).